(Medical Xpress)—The Triangle Model is a widely accepted theoretical framework that comprises the basis for a number of cognitive models of word reading. It is built around three primary cognitive units that encode different ...

Scientists say they have a better understanding of why people with Alzheimer's struggle to recognise and understand words - and their research has the potential to be developed into a test which could help clinicians make ...

Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating ...

Dyslexia is not only a problem related to reading; dyslexic children also display impaired prosodic processing—in other words, they struggle to detect stressed syllables. A team of Spanish researchers has shown this feature ...

For years, teachers have seen students who were promising readers in the primary grades begin to experience challenges in third and fourth grades as reading materials became more difficult. University of Kansas researchers ...

When we look at a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing to be processed. That's the finding from a Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, ...

A team of researchers at Saarland University headed by Professor Axel Mecklinger have shown that a short nap lasting about an hour can significantly improve memory performance. The study, which was coordinated by graduate ...

In 1969, two psychologists at the University of Illinois proposed what they called the Pollyanna Hypothesis—the idea that there is a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently than negative ones. "Put ...

Word

A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content) in a language, in contrast to a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme (e.g. cat), but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form (e.g. the English plural morpheme -s).

Typically, a word will consist of a root or stem, and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create other units of language, such as phrases, clauses, and/or sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together form a compound. A word combined with an already existing word or part of a word form a portmanteau.